P. Adams Sitney
P. Adams Sitney | |
|---|---|
 P. Adams Sitney in 2018 | |
| Born | August 9, 1944 |
| Died | June 8, 2025 (aged 80) Rhode Island, U.S. |
| Occupation | Film historian |
| Known for | Co-founding the Anthology Film Archives First to describe structural film |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Yale University (A.B., Ph.D.) |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | History of American avant-garde cinema |
| Institutions | |
P. Adams Sitney (August 9, 1944 - June 8, 2025), was a historian of American avant-garde cinema. He was known as the author of Visionary Film, one of the first books on the history of experimental film in the United States.[2]
Life
[edit]He grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. At fourteen years old, while wandering into a screening, the film that set the course of his life was the 1929 Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s collaboration Un Chien Andalou. He would later form a film society and published the newsletter Filmwise. He also traveled to Europe and Buenos Aires with programs of experimental films (watching screenings multiple times, documenting and taking notes)[3]
Career
[edit]Sitney attended Yale University, where he received an A.B. in classics in 1967 and a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1980. He co-founded the Anthology Film Archives in 1970[4] and, along with Jonas Mekas (who alongside Sitney and fellow filmmakers Barbara Rubin and David Brooks, were establishing the thriving movement known as New American Cinema[5]), Peter Kubelka, Ken Kelman, and James Broughton, served as one of the members of the Anthology Film Archives Essential Cinema[6] film selection committee. He is currently Professor of Visual Arts at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.[7]
Sitney was a fixture at New York University's doctoral program in its new cinema studies department in 1970. Before moving to Princeton, he also taught at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He has been a major critical leader and intellectual supporter of the New American Cinema avant-garde movement.[8]
Four main techniques that Sitney identified for structural film are: fixed camera position; flicker effect; re-photography off the screen; and loop printing. These techniques were implemented by experimental filmmakers in the 1960s to create cinema "in which the shape of the whole film is pre-determined and simplified".[9]
Sitney died peacefully in his home on June 8, 2025 after a short battle with advanced metastatic cancer.
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Drake, F. Thurston (19 October 2000). "Sitney's Take". The Daily Princetonian. Retrieved 29 June 2013.
After the pleasantries and questions—'When and where were you born?' 'August 9, 1944, New Haven, [Connecticut]'—I tossed out what I thought would be a great question, a real fast ball.
- ^ Amazon.com: Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 3rd edition
- ^ P. Adams Sitney, Flo Jacobs, and the Avant-garde|Current|The Criterion Collection
- ^ Anthology Film Archives: The First Screenings, 1970|Underground Film Journal
- ^ Neverlands: David Brooks and the New American Cinema – Art & Trash
- ^ Everleth, Mike (3 May 2010). "Anthology Film Archives' Essential Cinema Repertory Collection". Underground Film News. Underground Film Journal. Retrieved 29 June 2013.
- ^ "P. Adams Sitney".
- ^ P. Adams Sitney will hold a conference invited by EQZE-Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola
- ^ Chris, Meigh-Andrews (2006). A history of video art: the development of form and function. Oxford: Berg. ISBN 9781845202194. OCLC 69486182.
